Reading Classics, Alternative Education, and the Movement of Eternal Wisdom in Contemporary Chinese Societies

This dissertation, Reading Classics, Alternative Education, and the Movement of Eternal Wisdom in Contemporary Chinese Societies, investigates and theorizes dujing, a grassroots Confucian education movement in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese American communities. This movement mobilizes youths to read (mainly Confucian) classics aloud without understanding, with the hope that repetitive recitation will eventually lead to eternal wisdom (dao). In the most intensive forms, students read eight hours a day for years, often urged by parents (usually mothers) to drop out from legally mandatory mainstream schooling. I broaden the study of literacy practice to scales of family dynamics, moral economy of education, and conservative yet radical social movements. Drawing on anthropological literature on social movement, language ideology, and value theories, I approach dujing as a lens to examine how various Chinese families, particularly mothers, are drawn to the situational yearnings, anxieties, and strategies of reading classics. Therefore, I shed light on the dynamics of family and education in Chinese societies, the tension between grassroots movement and state nationalism in China, and the politics of knowledge/practice/wisdom in the changing world.Based on 24 months of fieldwork, I make four arguments in this dissertation: 1) The sound, repetition, and interactive discipline in dujing classrooms help dujing participants make sense of dujing’s practice of reading without understanding as the pursuit of wisdom (dao). 2) Dujing families gradually raise the stakes on dujing, from reading two hours a week to quitting mainstream schooling. This process is pushed by their moralization of dujing, the “economy of reading” and the “politics of wisdom” that dujing promotes, and the high stakes of education investment in contemporary China. Dujing is eventually mobilized as a conservative yet radical social movement. 3) The developments of dujing are affected by the diversifying histories, cultural politics, and configurations of grassroots movement in Mainland China and Taiwan. For instance, in the Cold War era, the Cultural Revolution in Mainland China and Taiwan’s promotions of Chinese culture set distinct starting points of dujing. In the contemporary context, Mainland China’s centralized governance of education, and state-endorsed revival of Confucianism, and Taiwan’s multiculturalism and vital religious landscape, resource and constrain the development of dujing, respectively. 4) Yet, dujing has evolved into a radical education movement in Mainland China, showing the radical potential and moral entanglement of grassroots engagement of classics, education, and wisdom in China